Tomato Pastes

[Mischka]

Post Tomato Paste Recipes here. :wink:

[Mischka]

Garden Tomato Paste

I make this every year with my surplus of plum tomatoes - you need to spend a few hours close to the stove, but it's worth it! Very handy to have in small amounts in the freezer.

7 lbs meaty tomatoes, such as plum
1/2 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped carrots
1 cup chopped onions
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil or 1 tablespoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary or 1/4 teaspoon dried rosemary
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
6 whole cloves
8 peppercorns
2 cloves garlic, chopped


3 hours 30 minutes 30 mins prep


1. Wash tomatoes and remove cores; coarsely chop- no need to peel.
2. In a large heavy saucepan, combine tomatoes with remaining ingredients.
3. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, about 25-30 minutes or until all ingredients are soft.
4. Press through a foodmill (preferable) or sieve.
5. Return to a clean heavy saucepan and cook over very low heat for about 3 hours, stirring occasionally, until very thick.
6. May take a bit longer.
7. Cool and pack into ice cube trays.
8. Freeze and transfer to freezer bags.



Tomato Paste Recipe #2

8 quarts peeled, chopped and cored tomatoes (about 4 dozen large ones)
1 1/2 cups chopped sweet red peppers (about 3)
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon salt
1 clove garlic, optional

Combine first four ingredients and cook slowly one hour. Press through a fine sieve. Add garlic if desired. Continue cooking slowly until thick enough to round up on a spoon, about 2 1/2 hours. Stir frequently to prevent sticking.

Remove garlic and while still hot, pour into hot Ball jars, leaving ¼ inch head space. Adjust caps.

Process 1/2 pints 45 minutes in boiling water bath. Makes 9 one half pints.



Tomato Paste Recipe #3

4 dozen large tomatoes
2 teaspoons salt, or to taste

Peel, core and chop tomatoes. Measure; you should have 8 quarts. Add salt. Place in large pot and simmer over low heat for about 1 hour. Stir often to prevent sticking. Remove from heat and press through a fine sieve or put through food mill. Return to kettle and continue to cook very slowly until paste holds its shape on a spoon — about 2 hours. Stir occasionally to prevent sticking.

Spoon into clean, hot jars, leaving 1/2-inch headspace; seal. Process in boiling water bath for 30 minutes.

Yields about 8 half pints.



Tomato Paste Recipe #4

Basically tomato paste are tomatoes that have been reduced, reduced again, and then reduced some more! It's ideal to make on a cold day over the gentle heat of a coal range.

* 24 large tomatoes
* 2 teaspoons salt or to taste
* olive oil

First score a cross on the bottom of each tomato using a sharp knife. Blanch the tomatoes in boiling water, then drop into ice cold water. After this the tomato peel should almost fall off. Pull the remaining peel off the tomatoes. Cut the core out and remove all the seeds. I keep the peelings for making homemade stock and the seeds for adding into stews etc. Chop the flesh and measure what you're left with which would normally be around 4 litres. Add ½ teaspoon of salt to each litre. Place the tomato and salt in a large pot and simmer over a low heat for around 1 hour, stiring often to prevent any catching and burning. Remove from the heat and press through a fine sieve or process through a food mill. Return the tomatoes to the pot and continue to cook very slowly until the paste holds its shape on a spoon, approximately 2 to 3 hours. Stir occasionally to prevent any sticking.

Spoon into hot sterilized jars, leaving 3cm (1 in) at the top. Slop on a little olive oil to cover and seal. Ensure the lids have vacuum sealed, or the paste will spoil. Alternatively you can fill and freeze ice cube trays and free flow cubes of paste in freezer bags for use later.



Microwave Tomato Paste

Tomato paste is something that gets used in our house quite a bit for pasta sauces. Normally I just buy a can of it at the grocery store and season the heck out of it to mask the canned taste. This recipe uses a carousel microwave (one with a turntable) and calls for four pounds of fresh tomatoes (not the bouncy, rubbery orangish ones from your local supermarket) and makes one cup of tomato paste.

First, you need to peel the tomatoes. Seed the tomatoes by squeezing the seeds out of them, then cut them in half and make sure that you got all the seeds out. You should seed them over a trash can, wearing an ex’s t-shirt or something else you don’t care about, because you will get splashed. It helps to mutter _”Brains….BRAINS….” while you’re doing this.

Then, cut the tomatoes in half, then cut the halves into quarters. One tomato should be cut into eight pieces. Once you’re done cutting the tomatoes up (or after you cut each one), put the pieces in a microwave-safe bowl. Microwave the tomatoes for ten minutes on high, stir them to break the pieces up a bit and keep the heating somewhat even, then nuke ‘em on high for ten more minutes. This is a good time to fix yourself a drink, peel more tomatoes, read a newspaper article… you get the idea.

When you’re done with the second microwaving, take the tomatoes out and run them through a Food Mill, blender or food processor. The cookbook calls for a food mill, but heck, how many people actually have one of those laying around the kitchen?

Once you’re done milling/processing/blending, transfer the tomatoes back into the microwave safe bowl and cook on high for twenty minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure nothing burns. You’ll have at least a cup of quality, fresh tomato paste.



Tomato Paste (Conserva) Recipe

Conserva is essentially homemade tomato paste, though it's much better than the little can of tomato paste you'll find at the market. Conserva's flavor is deep and complex, a tomato reduced to its purest, richest, form. Make it now, while the season's still in swing!

As with many slow-cooked dishes, the technique is simple. Preheat the oven to 300°. Dice five pounds of tomatoes into medium-sized chunks. Make sure they taste good, but any subtle flavors will be lost on the way to conserva, so don't worry about buying heirloom, etc. varieties. An affordable, ripe basic tomato works well.

You'll need a big, shallow sauté pan. Pour a little olive oil into the pan, and bring it up to a medium heat. Boil the tomatoes, with a pinch of salt, for about two minutes.

Pour everything into a food mill outfitted with the smallest disc and set over a big bowl (you may need to do this in batches). Process the tomatoes through the food mill. Pour the contents of the bowl into a "large" jelly roll pan (a half sheet pan, for those who think in restaurant terms). For our pan, the tomato pulp and liquid came perilously close to brimming over.

Carefully, put the pan in the oven. Cook for four to five hours, stirring the mixture every hour, until the paste is dry. A dough scraper makes this fairly easy. You'll notice the mixture get thicker and thicker.

Now choose: Do as Bertolli suggests and cook at 250° for another two and a half hours, only to find a blackened, unusable mess on the jelly roll pan, or remove the paste from the oven as I did on my second attempt.

Let the conserva cool to room temperature and scoop it into a jar. My yield was on the order of one-half cup. That's right: five pounds of tomatoes reduced to one-half cup. Smooth the conserva surface, and top off with one-half inch of olive oil. Bertolli says you can keep it at room temperature indefinitely, but I put mine in the refrigerator and pulled it out a few hours before I used it.



(Recipes gathered from various internet sources)

[cosmicgardener]

Wow - that's what I call Service!

L

[Sorellina]

Mischka,

That Conserva recipe was a relief to see. My Nonna used to make it in Sicily outside on a slab of marble and she'd spread it out like you would butter a piece of toast. She'd keep spreading it around all day long and then cover it with cheesecloth at the end of the day. This entire process took a fortnight for the moisture to reduce, but the results were of course, fabulous. You don't use as much of this concentrate as you would regular tomato paste. She always used San Marzanos for this and my uncle Auggie has kept our family's supply of seeds going since she came over to New York in the '20's.

[DiggingDogFarm]

I've made Tomato Conserva aka Conserva di Pomodori for years....with no added 'perfumes'..... dehydrated at the lowest oven setting....150-175 degrees (so it doesn't caramelize).....stirring regularly......it's awesome stuff!


~Dig

[z_willus_d]

Misplaced reply (wrong thread). Admin please delete if possible.

[David52]

I was pawing through the chest freezer the other day and found a qt of frozen, half-dehydratted Aunt Gertie's Gold tomatoes I'd forgotten about. I made a spread with that, a bit of dried oregano, bit of dried ancho chili, grated a clove of garlic, and whirred it up in a food processor.

Pretty good stuff, spread on toast.

[Tracydr]

I made a tomato paste last year, similar to the conserva, but with a bit of added wine, garlic, dried basil and oregano. I cooked it in my crockpot on the lowest setting overnight.
Condensed down to a thick, maroon paste. I thought I'd ruined about forty pounds of tomatoes at first, tow huge crockpots worth, because it appeared to be completely scorched and stuck. But, it wasn't scorched and the flavor was intensely amazing. I canned it in little half pint jars and it can be added to a large can of tomatoes, used for pizza sauce, so many uses!
This will be how I can a large amount of my tomatoes from now on.
It is a little depressing, though, to see how few, little, tiny jars you get from an enormous amount of tomatoes and a lot of prep/milling work.
Ps-freezing the tomatoes first causes the skins to slide off and helps to remove tons of water. Saves a lot of reduction time.

[ArcherB]

I've only done this a couple of times, so take with a grain of salt, but it made a pretty good paste and sauce. The paste was the consistency of tomato paste from a can, but it tasted like tomatoes.

Peel the tomatoes using the blanch method and removed the cores/tops. Compost these or use them in some other recipe if you like.

Cut tomatoes in half or however works for you to remove the seeds. Place the seeds and gel in a strainer over a large bowl. Make sure you strainer is fine enough to prevent seeds from going through it. Place the "meat" part of the tomatoes in a salad spinner. When full, spin it until it nearly vibrates off the counter. You want to get nearly all of the water from the meaty part of the tomatoes.

Pour the watery juice from the salad spinner over the seed/gel mix. I had to do this several time as the salad spinner kept filling up. I liked to dip the strainer into the watery stuff to get out every last bit of gel, leaving nothing but seeds. Pick out any pieces of tomato that somehow made it to the seed/gel bowl.

Pour watery mix into a non-stick skillet and boil at medium-high heat, stirring frequently. Place the stuff from the salad spinner in a crock pot or large sauce pot on med-low. Bury the seeds deep in your compost pile (you can probably save these if you can sterilize them and you are only using one type of tomato).

Keep boiling and stirring the watery mix in the non-stick skillet until it boils down. Add more of the watery mix as needed until it becomes a thick paste. If the tomatoes in the crock pot start to separate leaving a bunch of water on the top, you may also also add this to the skillet. This will save you a ton of time trying to boil it down in a crock pot. Keep boiling and adding more of the tomato water until you have used all the tomato water and the paste is the same consistency as the stuff you get from the can. This can take an hour or two.

You can keep the paste and sauce separate. I like to recombine them in the crock pot.

Add whatever seasonings you desire for whatever it is you are making (stew, chili, marinara). Blend if it makes you happy. Cook until you think its done.